North Korea might try to hack cryptocurrency exchanges

Last week, the CWIC Cyber Warfare Research Center in South Korea stated that North Korean hackers target both South Korean and world’s altcoin exchanges and digital currency services.

Recently, the set of new sanctions was imposed unanimously by the UN Security Council on the North Korean regime that continuously violated previous resolutions and further upgraded its nuclear missiles. This might stimulate the North Korean government to use its hacker brigades once again, similar to how they hacked Sony Pictures because of the film about Kim Jong-un the North Korean administration considered completely unacceptable. Only this time, the targets will be financial networks, including but not limited to cryptocurrency exchange environments.

The report states that South Korean fintech firms and small businesses that built their work around Internet tools. The main instrument of North Korean hackers is the malicious code inserted into an e-mail message that poses as an official letter from a governmental agency or a common person who is looking for a job in the target company.

Why did they start to target the cryptocurrency sphere? As Lim Jon-in, the professor of the Graduate School of Information Security at Korea university explains, the North Korean leadership sees new opportunities there – “you can conceal the identity” of the digital currency owner and “secure a new source of foreign currency”.